Spectral Layers… Say What!

In one of the first classes that I taught film editing, in I had a student bring in audio where the dialogue was recorded poorly and was surrounded by street noise. She asked how to fix it. Final Cut Pro was pretty popular and she was under the impression that we could click a button and remove the audio and only have the dialogue. I informed her that was not possible and ADR was her best solution. But time was running out, she needed to get this project in or face loosing marks.

To see if there was anything we could do I called up a friend who worked as a mixer at Crunch Recording Group (Now a part of Optix). The line went silent for a second, then there was a breath and he said:

“One File, One Sound”

We both knew without ADR this audio was no good. The student had to do the recording or accept the audio as it was.

Yesterday, Sony took me to see their software that is coming out called Spectral Layers. Date of release and price are to be announced. This, as you’ll hear, is straight out of CSI. The software harnesses the ability to isolate specific sounds within a file and separate them. You can remove that pesky siren out of the background, the car, the barking dog. Whatever you want!

This software was initially designed for music, the engineer was a musician but the second I saw it I wanted to call all my friends in post audio. Sony may have designed this for music but it will become a staple in film.

Unfortunately, there are no press release documents or images. The interface had the image of the wave form blown up spectrally. As you pull the audio out it gets placed into a layer similar to photoshop. After this you control the layers and choose what the audience hears.